Mr Nnimmo Bassey, the Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), said setting up a nuclear plant in Nigeria would be suicidal given the high level of operational challenges it would face.

Bassey said this in Abuja while presenting a paper titled: “Risks and deaths as workers generate wealth” organised by HOMEF’s Sustainability Academy on Health and the Extractive Sector Workers.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the programme was sponsored by the UNDP and the Federal Ministry of Environment in collaboration with HOMEF.

He said that the setting up of a nuclear plant was suicidal because of the high technical and environmental demand associated with handling radioactive materials.

“Uranium and nuclear power plants are inseparable. Nigeria has found it difficult to run simple hydroelectric and thermal power plants.

“It would be suicidal to install nuclear power plants here,” Bassey said.

The director said the proposal to site such a facility in Akwa Ibom would not be advisable because of the serious environmental implication.

“And to think of locating one in Akwa Ibom State is nothing but adding insult to injury in an already highly polluted Niger Delta.

“It will also be a time bomb set against the workers,’’ he said.

Bassey said that the sustainability academy was aimed at highlighting the fact that workers and communities were at the frontlines of exposure to toxic chemicals that often result in fatalities.

The director further said that more than 2.3 million workers worldwide had been exposed to work-related diseases or accidents annually.

He said that more than one million extractive industries workers die annually of toxic chemical across the globe.

He quoted the ITUC’s Secretary General to have said that occupational cancer was not a mystery disease but result of workers’ exposure to danger when working with cancer-inducing chemicals.

Bassey said that workers with asbestos and petrochemical companies were exposed to high presence of benzene which could cause cancer.

He further quoted the ITUC leader as saying, “wherever stricter controls are proposed, industry representatives or their hired guns appear, challenging the science and predicting an economic catastrophe.’’

Bassey said that companies in the extractive sector spent huge amount of money in efforts to block regulations seeking to curb the use of certain chemicals to reduce the exposure of workers to harm.

“To do this, they churn out tonnes of publications and glossy so-called sustainability reports while all the time promoting what has been described as paralysis by analysis.

“Workers’ labour to make a living. Sadly, for many the wages of work has been death. The occupational hazards that workers face are challenge for those in the formal and informal sectors.

“Stringent regulatory and control measures as well as strong and united labour unions are needed to halt the menace,’’ Bassey said.

The director said that the health impacts of the extractives operations had swallowed up lives beyond the mine pits which had claimed the lives of 400 children during lead poison episode in Zamfara.

He said that the sector had also been arena of conflicts where people’s right were abused through community displacement, toxic work conditions and the burying alive of artisanal miners in Ghana and Tanzania.

He said others include outright shooting and killing of miners as was the case in Marikana, South Africa.

He said that miners in Namibia digging uranium ore for mining companies had developed lung cancer, leukemia, kidney diseases and other ailments from the free particles and radioactive gas inhaled during the process.

Bassey said one of the miners testified that the doctors were instructed not to inform them about their results or illnesses but kept supplying them with medications when they were finished or about to die.

The director said that in spite of the health and safety measures announced by extractive sector, workers sometimes were not aware of the dangers their daily toil portend.

“Sadly, however, some workers fully aware that they are making a dying, not a living as they toil in dangerous activities continue in silence due to fear of job losses,’’Bassey said.

He said that the struggle to secure the health of workers, communities and the planet had been an epic struggle against a ravenous system that feeds on profits and swims in the sweat and blood of workers.

He said that the time had come for the dichotomy between workers and community to be eliminated.

Bassey said that to change this system, labour and other stakeholders must team up to confront the reckless myopic consumption and a crass lack of concern about the future. (NAN)